Thank you all who participated in, followed and helped arrange Wiki Loves Maps and #Hack4FI!

We loved you being here!

Wiki Loves Maps seminar (February 5, 2015) and hackathon (February 6–8, 2015) were arranged in Helsinki. The altogether 4 days brought together a full house on all the days. Wiki Loves Maps seminar was organized by Wikimedia Suomi in collaboration with the city of Helsinki. Wiki Loves Maps hackathon was part of #Hack4FI – Hack Your Heritage event. Thanks to our team Teemu, Samppa and Ari, and thanks to the #Hack4FI team Sanna, Laura and Neea, as well as Anna, Arttu and Juhani from the Media Factory!

Seminar​

Historical Aleksanterinkatu

The theme of Wiki Loves Maps was Historical Aleksanterinkatu. It’s a joint initiative with the City of Helsinki to gather historical materials about the city, combine and reuse them. Arend Oudman gave a bird’s eye view to the city through the series of Historical aerial images from the Metropolitan area he has gathered, prepared and opened. Martti Helminen from the City Archives is the originator of the Aleksanterinkatu theme. He took us through the history of the street with images, maps and drawings.

GLAMs working together with Wikimedia

Collaboration projects in the Nordic countries between GLAM organizations and Wikimedia chapters.

Keynote: Peter Neubauer, Mapillary

Peter presented Mapillary, a crowdsourced street view environment. But more than that, he pointed out the necessity of open source and content, and the need to create together. He also came up with the term open past!

Cultural hackathons #Hack4DK, #Hack4NO and #Hack4FI

DIY History

We collected a set of speakers to present different approaches to working with local and personal history. These materials have fallen outside publicly funded GLAM endeavours, they are not suited for Wikimedia for their lack of notability and they largely live in commercial services.

Sanna Jokela, Lounaispaikka Developing public services for local history and tourism and possibilities with historical geodata. Picture

Kaisa Kyläkoski, Sukututkijan loppuvuosi Social media as a platform for a DIY historian. Input – output

#Hack4FI hackathon

The hackathon, the first of a kind in Finland, was a tour de force of AvoinGLAM. After the weekend participants have six weeks to finalise their works. The hackathon ends 26 March with a gala, where the final works will be presented and awarded.

Wiki Loves Maps projects were only a part of hacks done over the weekend, and you can see a full list of ideas here. Have a taste of maps projects, or projects by mappers, that were worked on during the event!

Historical street view

Ajapaik–Mapillary

We aim to connect two projects: Ajapaik for using people’s help in locating places of old images and Mapillary for seamlessly stitching those images into a street view. Signe Brander’s Helsinki images are in Ajapaik already and more will follow! The first test transfers from Ajapaik to Mapillary are being made.

Map of OpenStreetMap objects with links to Wikipedia articles

If the background map needs adjusting, go to Wikimaps Warper to fix it! If the link to a Wikipedia article is missing, add Wikidata/Wikipedia tags to objects in OpenStreetMap. If a Wikipedia article is missing, you should write one! (And translate it to several languages.)

We also came up with a plan to brush up Wikipedia article introductions to meet Simple Finnish guidelines, and tag them with specific markup. We will team up with writers and users of these texts. To be continued…

The Finnish National Gallery artists database will be imported to Wikidata, and Finnish Wikipedia will be validated manually against that data. By Kimmo Virtanen.

Guests from afar

Ecuadorian Paul Villavicencio studies Information Science in Nagoya, Japan. The words Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums caught his attention on the Wiki Loves Maps web pages and he decided to travel to the seminar and take part in the hackathon.

While studying in Ecuador, Paul worked in the university library. The librarian, his friend and colleague, is an advocate of openness and collaboration with memory institutions. The possibility of contributing to his work made Paul choose to join the event.

#Hack4Fi was Paul’s first ever hackathon and he was not sure what to expect. After a bit of disorientation facilitator Sanna helped him join a project team and use his expertise on content retrieval in the Talking Heads project. Seeing memory institutions take part in hacking among others, and participating in cross-disciplinary work was a memorable experience. What made all this worthwhile, is that he hopes to bring back his experiences to his colleague in Ecuador.

We talked with Paul together with Mace Ojala, an information science student and participant in #Hack4FI

Looking forward to the next cultural hackathon. Hope to see you all there!

The Finnish Museum of Photography has opened images of Helsinki by I.K. Inha (1865–1930) in Flickr and Wikimedia Commons. They were originally photographed for the first Finnish travel guide “A Guide to Helsinki”, published in 1910 by The Nation of Southern Finland.

Wiki Loves Maps seminar (February 2, 2015) and hackathon (February 6–8, 2015) brings together 18 speakers from 6 countries. The events are fully booked, but we will stream them in video for all to enjoy. You may also join the waiting list.

Videostream

The seminar will be streamed online on Thursday from 9.30 am to 4.30 pm.

See you at Aalto Media Factory!

Both seminar and hackathon take place at the Aalto Media Factory outside the city center of Helsinki in the campus of Aalto ARTS University in Arabia. You will get there by bus or by tram. The bus ride takes 20 minutes and the tram ride half an hour.

The building of the Union Bank of Finland in the middle next to the tram. Signe Brander, 1907, Helsingin kaupunginmuseo.

Social program

Thursday Feb 2, 5–6 pm

The Bank Museum of Nordea Bank welcomes Wiki Loves Maps participants in the bank building originally built for the Union Bank of Finland. Aleksanterinkatu is a real banking street: all Finnish banks had their offices there. The history of today’s Nordea Bank covers the story of altogether 25 commercial banks. The museum displays the interior designed by Gesellius–Lindgren–Saarinen that has been saved from the demolished building Pohjoismaiden Osakepankki two blocks away.

Thursday Feb 5, 8 pm

The Bombardment of Helsinki

Friday Feb 6, 6.51–9.40 pm and 00.57–4.57 am

The night between Friday and Saturday marks the 71st anniversary of massive Soviet bombardments of Helsinki. In the seminar, Martti Helminen from Helsinki City Archives tells about the bombardments and materials gathered. But what will happen on Friday night? Could this be the topic of your hackathon project?

Helsinki Walks in Aleksanterinkatu

In Search for the Idea of Finland: The Senate Square and Aleksanterinkatu

Saturday Feb 7, 9.00 am

Laura Kolbe and Janne Viitamies take you to a morning stroll in the history of Aleksanterinkatu on Saturday 9.00 am. Meeting at the statue of Alexander II. Everyone is welcome!

Other picks

WikiProject Wiki Loves Maps!

The Finnish Wikipedia hosts WikiProject Wiki Loves Maps for discovering articles about Aleksanterinkatu to enhance, translate or illustrate. Join gathering the list of articles about Aleksanterinkatu: streets, houses, people and events!

Hackathon projects

Aleksi historical images through times

We are collecting historical photographs and other images about Aleksanterinkatu. Join placing them in the right coordinates and the right angle! We plan to create a historical street view.

In the house of Sunn

We gather historical documents about the house of Sunn, and see what we can make of them!

Mobile

Navigating in the city space, audio excerpts from the environment. Stories of houses and objects.

Editathon and mapathon for Aleksi!

Let’s fix the Wikipedia articles of Aleksi! Books from Helsinki City Library and online treasures will be available to help us with that. Let’s also enhance data about buildings in OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap from 1900

Wiki Loves Maps lessons

Hackathon participants can teach each other tools and techniques. Here are some of the ideas brought up. The lessons are open to all hackathon participants and you can register by joining. Propose your own!

Stereogranimator meets Akseli Gallen-Kallela

Make a gif animation or a 3D anaglyph from historical stereo photographs with the New York Public Library Stereogranimator. Mauricio Giraldo shows you how.

Read Wikipedia through an API

Get the introductory paragraph about any topic, in all languages. André Costa advices in the use of Wikipedia APIs.

Wikimaps Warper

Let’s rectify an old map to new coordinates for using in mobile apps. Susanna Ånäs and Jyrki Lehtinen.

The Bank Museum

Thursday Feb 2, 5–6 pm

The Bank Museum of Nordea Bank welcomes Wiki Loves Maps participants in the bank building originally built for the Union Bank of Finland. Aleksanterinkatu is a real banking street: all Finnish banks had their offices there. The history of today’s Nordea Bank covers the story of altogether 25 commercial banks. The museum displays the interior designed by Gesellius–Lindgren–Saarinen that has been saved from the demolished building Pohjoismaiden Osakepankki two blocks away.

Thursday Feb 5, 8 pm

The Bombardment of Helsinki

Friday Feb 6, 6.51–9.40 pm and 00.57–4.57 am

The night between Friday and Saturday marks the 71st anniversary of massive Soviet bombardments of Helsinki. In the seminar, Martti Helminen from Helsinki City Archives tells about the bombardments and materials gathered. But what will happen on Friday night? Could this be the topic of your hackathon project?

Helsinki Walks in Aleksanterinkatu

In Search for the Idea of Finland: The Senate Square and Aleksanterinkatu

Saturday Feb 7, 9.00 am

Laura Kolbe and Janne Viitamies take you to a morning stroll in the history of Aleksanterinkatu on Saturday 9.00 am. Meeting at the statue of Alexander II. Everyone is welcome!

Newsletter #2

Welcome to the seminar (February 5, 2015) and a hackathon (February 6–8, 2015) about citizen history and cartography! The events are organized by Wikimedia Finland in collaboration with the City of Helsinki! Wiki Loves Maps hackathon is part of the Hack4FI event.

Maptime

Maptime‘s mission is to open the doors of cartographic possibility to anyone interested in map creation using mapping tools and technologies. Inspiration for Maptime comes from both hack nights and knitting circles. Both are models of spaces for people to create and learn together. Some people are experts, and some people are just getting started, but all are learning, so why not do it together? Bert Spaan from Waag Society will present Maptime Amsterdam.

Saturday 7.2. 10.00–20.00

Working all day

Sunday 8.2. 10.00–18.00

16.00 Project presentations

The hunt for Aleksi images is on!

We are looking for images from around Aleksanterinkatu for making experiencing history exciting. Openly licensed images are key to make it happen. Images can be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons when they are inpublic domain or they are licensed with CC BY-SA or more permissive licenses.

We are listing Aleksanterinkatu photographs, paintings, books and stuff in theMaterials page.

Join the hackathon!

Propose a lesson to the Wiki Loves Maps Hack School!

Do you master a skill or a technique that will be useful to the other participants? Perhaps a piece of software or a technology. Propose a lesson! We will reserve a classroom and make a curriculum. All hackathon participants will be able to participate!

Peter Neubauer

Mapillary is a Swedish startup, whose aim is to create a map with photos of every place on Earth, an independent “street view” photographed by people. Could the same be done to historical imagery?

Topics

Working with Wikimedia volunteers on cultural heritage

Lars Lundqvist from The Swedish National Heritage Board opens the showcase session of cultural heritage partnership projects between cultural organizations and Wikimedia volunteers from Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Estonia.

Case studies

What kind of tools could we use to revive the bygone Aleksanterinkatu in the city center of Helsinki? We’ll familiarize with several projects that take different approaches to historical geodata.

Cultural hackathons

#Hack4FI is the newcomer in the series of Nordic cultural hackathons. We’ll revisit the cultural hackathons of #Hack4DK and #Hack4NO.

Opportunities for citizen historians

In the Nordic countries there are several storytelling platforms created for cultural heritage, allowing the coming together of the cultural organizations’ materials and the citizens’ archives and stories. How can a third sector actor support the coalescence of public and private archives? In the panel we will look for ways to collect and recite the thousands of perspectives of collective memory.

Do you possess material about Aleksanterinkatu?

Attention museums, archives, city offices, companies, individuals or research projects! We are looking for maps, aerial images, photographs, data, printed matter or drawings about Aleksanterinkatu through times, featuring buildings, people, companies, events or traffic. You can hint and link materials you know in our Trello page or contact us!

Join the hackathon!

Propose a lesson to the Wiki Loves Maps School!

Do you master a skill or a technique that will be useful to the other participants? Perhaps a piece of software or a technology. Propose a lesson! We will reserve a classroom and make a curriculum. All hackathon participants will be able to participate!